How do you measure online success? Is it the number of followers you have on Twitter? How about the number of friends you have on Facebook? Are you ranked number one in your area for points on Active Rain?
Back in the 1980's I had a little Electronic Bulletin Board System (BBS) "page". It contained my name, phone number, business address and about a paragraph of what I did for a living. It took about 45 seconds do display on the visitors page and it looked something like this:
Back then I had no idea how many people even saw my "page", had no hyperlinks they could click to apply online, there was no blog to comment on ... I, like the others, was a pirate on a lonely, digital island in the sky.
Times have changed
Now I have dozens of social media accounts, several community blogs, a handful of CMS sites for myself, and social monitoring accounts to help me keep it all in track. The question remains - is it working? How do I know if it does?
Almost everyone starts a DYI online PR/marketing and social media campaign the same way:
Step 1 - Jump in, get an account and wonder "what am I doing"?
Step 2 - Start to figure out how to "add friends" and "follow people"
Step 3 - either add/follow too many or add/follow too few
Step 4 - ask questions and try to learn
Step 5 - follow some really bad advice or overpay/pay for free advice
Step 6 - Overpay for a service you could do yourself or a service you never use
Step 7 - give up, go away broke and mad and tell everyone social media doesn't work
Don't worry if that's almost exactly you because it's almost exactly the majority of people. The good news about online is you can "erase and start over" to a large degree. Most people reading this short article have not done enough damage to their personal brand to worry about it. Even if you have there is still hope.
But having all those followers makes me feel good
Fine. Nobody with any understanding of SM marketing and PR is going to give you grief about having thousands and thousands of followers, friends or whatever. You will need to answer this question though, "Is social media and all that you do online bringing you the goals you want to achieve?"
Those goals may simply be social, they may be for your ego but they almost certainly also need to be financial. Most people have no idea how to measure their online success financially. While I will give away a lot of information and even the answers to these questions I'm not going to do so (at this time) in an open forum where people who don't know how can adopt the ideas as their own.
Be careful who you choose to help you
When Social Media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) first started gaining in popularity we had overnight explosion of "social media experts". We still do. There are plenty of people billing their selves as WordPress experts, Facebook experts or online marketing "gurus" who know perhaps just a little more than you about the subject.
The worst thing that can happen to you and the community is for an amateur to sell you a solution, not be able to back it up, have no idea how to really do what they say they are going to do then leave you high and dry the first time a little challenge comes along.
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